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May 19, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
51:25
1912 Freedom 101 - Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio Interviewed on Resistance Radio
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Hi there, Stefan. Welcome to the Mr.
Britt Show on Resistance Radio.
Thank you so much. It's great to be here.
Excellent. Great to have you here tonight, man.
How's it doing over there in Canada?
You know, it's a beautiful, beautiful day after a ridiculously long, hard winter and a very, very rainy spring.
The skies have opened.
I was mowing the lawn, doing some weeding, getting some good old sun.
Nice tomato head, anarchist projectile is what I'm thinking of myself as these days.
Excellent. Whereabouts are you in Canada?
My girlfriend's actually from Canada.
Oh, she's just outside of Toronto.
Okay, okay. My girlfriend's from Ottawa, so I haven't actually been there myself, but I'd love to visit one day soon.
Yeah, there's some great stuff to see in Canada.
You know, it wouldn't be my top ten places in the world to go, but that's just because I live here, so it's not exotic, I suppose.
Okay, but you were actually born in England, I believe.
I was born in Ireland, my friend.
Okay, but you grew up in England, is that right?
I was born in Ireland. I grew up in England and came to Canada when I was 11 or 12, something like that.
Spent a little bit of time in South Africa and then I went to theatre school and tried to lose my accent, which is why I get at least once a week an email saying, where the hell are you from, man?
I cannot place your accent.
It's because it's a tour of the colonies.
Tried to be scrubbed away, that's all I can say.
Okay, so you're all over the place basically.
So I don't know whether you heard my introduction there, Stefan, but basically what I'd like to do tonight is just for you to kind of introduce people to your anarchic ideas because, as I said, there are lots of people who listen to resistance radio who maybe haven't explored anarchy.
And I recently read your book, Everyday Anarchy, which I thought was a very good introduction to the subject.
So we're not going to be getting into anything, you know, too deep and complex tonight, but I think this is a good opportunity to lay out the basics.
Right, right. See state grow.
See deficit grow.
See economy collapse.
I'm sorry. We won't do follow the bouncing ball.
Okay, look. A very brief introduction to anarchy is – the first introduction you need is don't be too scared of the word.
It's a word that's got a lot of flies attached to it, though it really shouldn't.
Anarchy is simply a universal acceptance and application The non-aggression principle.
That's all it is. That's all it fundamentally is.
The initiation of force is immoral.
You can use force against someone who's running at you with a chainsaw or about to drop a piano on your head.
If you're in the Looney Tunes cartoon, you can use force to prevent that, but the initiation of the use of force is immoral.
If we accept that basic kindergarten principle, don't hit, don't steal, don't punch, don't push, then The consequences of that are enormous.
In the same way, scientifically, if you accept that the speed of light is constant, then massive understandings flow from that simple basic premise.
If you accept that the Sun is the center of the solar system rather than orbits the Earth, things fall into place.
Things make sense. And in the same way, in the field of philosophy and politics, we need to get out of the chaos of the everyday.
You know, all of the push and pull and frustration of today's headlines and tomorrow's headlines and they did this and they're now allowing cops to enter your homes without a warrant and blah, blah.
We have to pull all the way back from that.
Look at it from a big philosophical high tower, high peak.
You have to Really reorganize your thinking when society is going seriously awry and you start with a clean slate like anybody who wants to make any fundamental change starts with a clean slate.
All men are created equal. Pretty good clean slate.
We should not initiate the use of force and that is a universal statement.
So what you get from that is the illegitimacy of states, of governments because governments by not even an anarchic definition but any standard definition Governments are individuals who have the moral obligation to initiate the use of force in a particular geographical area.
They can initiate the use of force in taxation, in regulation, in compulsory attendance laws for children to go to school, or at least to go to government schools, which is a true misuse of the word schools.
They can print currency at will.
They can indebt future generations.
They can throw anybody in jail who competes with what they want to have a monopoly on and this is fundamentally immoral.
It would be immoral if you did it, it would be immoral if I did it and it's immoral if people in a dome-shaped building do it as well.
This is where society is just getting more and more awful and problematic and ridiculous and destructive.
The more violence you allow in society, just like the more violence you allow in your life, the worse society gets, the worse your life gets.
So we have to re-establish a commitment to the non-aggression principle, extend it to all people, and look for alternatives to solving social problems other than, hey, let's give a small group of guys all the weapons in the world and have them throw anyone who disagrees with them fundamentally in jail, and boy, won't that solve everything in the world.
Well, of course it doesn't, and we're seeing the evidence of that as time marches forward.
Absolutely. And so why do you think it is that the very word anarchy has such negative connotations and associations?
If you mention the word anarchy, people imagine black lad used firebombing shops and things like that.
I mean, I've raised the subject myself with family and the reaction wasn't too positive, to be quite honest.
So why has that happened?
Well, look, I mean, Anarchy has a long and noble tradition in Western thought.
It's just suppressed. Of course it's suppressed.
I mean, why would the rulers want to talk about a society without rulers?
I mean, that doesn't make any sense.
That's like some wife abuser talking about feminism.
It's just not going to happen. So, I mean, Tolkien was an anarchist, Chomsky is an anarchist, Tolstoy was an anarchist, Kropotkin, and lots and lots, of course, Russia, with all of its oppressive rules, has been a ripe, fertile ground for anarchy since day one.
Of course, you're not going to be taught about that which will set you free.
You don't go to the farm, if you're the farmer, and teach all of your cows about the joys of wide open fields and not being chained in a stall and giving up all your milk every day.
You're just not going to teach them about that.
Government schools aren't going to teach you about nonviolence and egalitarianism under the law as a solution to social problems.
Imagine the scene.
The teacher says, we should not initiate the use of force and that should be a universal thing.
Then kids would say, well, why am I forced to be here?
Wait, wait. How much is your salary paid?
Isn't your salary paid from property taxes that are extracted from my parents by force?
You hypocritical slug, how on earth are you going to teach us that nonviolence is the way or the peaceful solutions are the way when your funding in this entire institution is founded on the initiation of force?
That is a five-minute conversation with a not-too-intelligent kid.
The whole system comes down if you're taught that there are alternatives.
To arming a minority and giving them quasi-dictatorial powers over a geographical area.
You're just not going to hear about these things.
They don't teach Hayek under Stalin and they don't teach anarchy under statism.
Okay, so maybe let's go back a little bit more into your past, and when did you start, you know, discussing and thinking about anarchic ideas?
Maybe you can talk us through the development of your own personal politics.
Oh, that's embarrassing, man.
It was ridiculously late, and I had no excuse whatsoever.
Look, I was, you know, your standard libertarian objectivist minarchist since, you know, the usual, I read The Fountainhead when I was I was 16 and then dove into that whole world but I hadn't read anything to do with anarchism.
I hadn't read any any Rothbard or any of these sorts of people.
I hadn't read anything about it and I'd read of course the rather contemptuous and frankly idiotic dismissal of anarchism by Ayn Rand and so I didn't know anything about it so until about my mid-30s, 20 years I was doing this dancing around the well you need taxation but it could be voluntary you know like you need rape but it can be voluntary.
And then in conversation I was having with some employees I had at work.
They were very smart college kids and they were debating me.
I came up with an idea.
And of course, when you come up with an idea, you have this impression that you're the first one.
And I've since found out that I certainly wasn't.
About how you could solve problems without a government at all.
And I just started going down that path.
And then I got some articles published and I started...
Doing some podcasts, I had a long commute.
I used to be an executive in the software field.
I had a long commute, did some shows in my car, and then eventually decided to quit my career and go full-time into yelling at people about peaceful solutions on the internet.
That's sort of been my job for the last couple of years.
Okay, excellent. So maybe you can tell us, because you're obviously anti-state, but we're fed the propaganda all the time that democracy is good.
Democracy is the most enlightened state of affairs that we can have in the world.
And that's very much the message that's put out there by certainly the Anglo-American empire.
Maybe you can tell us how you would critique democracy and what you think is wrong with democracy, which a lot of people think is the ideal.
Right. Well, let me just sort of correct you.
To be anti-state is not my particular definition.
I'm anti-violence.
I'm anti the initiation of force.
So I'm against, you know, parents beating their kids, friends beating each other, husbands beating wives, wives beating children.
I'm against violence as a whole.
One of the ways in which I'm against violence is through an opposition to the moral legitimacy of the state.
But to say anti-state, it's just a bit narrow, if you don't mind me doing that annoying correction.
That's fine. But democracy has never, ever, ever been an ideal throughout human history.
Now you hear, of course, because democracy legitimizes those in power, so of course they're going to praise its value.
But democracy has universally been considered a disaster everywhere that it's been tried.
Because the poor outnumber the rich and in a democracy, all that will happen is the poor will vote to take away the money of the rich and everybody will end up broke.
So democracy has been a consistent historical disaster.
If you look at ancient Greece, what did democracy do?
They put Socrates to death and made and then collapsed an empire.
You look at Rome, what did they do?
Well, they made and collapsed an empire.
You look at England and at Spain and at Portugal, what did it do?
Made and collapsed an empire and the same thing is happening to The problem with democracy is that it relies on the initiation of force.
Democracy could only really conceivably work – I mean it could work in a local area, right?
I mean we all have – you get to work together with some friends and you may have some disagreements about where to go out for the evening but maybe usually the vote wins.
If nine people out of ten people want to go to one place and this other – he'll usually go along, right?
So as long as it's peaceful and voluntary, who has any problem with voting?
Well, nobody of course, right?
This happens of course in companies.
You may get a vote from the shareholders for a particular policy.
At a board level, you may vote in a CEO or a CFO or whatever.
Voting is fine as long as it doesn't involve the initiation of force.
I think it's important to differentiate democracy in terms of just people getting together to take some sort of collective action.
Versus democracy which is citizens being lied to by politicians whose loyalties have already been bought by special interests.
Who then vote for policies which they have no legal ability to force into occurrence.
Politicians can say whatever they want.
They don't have to follow anything.
If you look at the list of what Obama said he was going to do when he got into office, pull the troops out and close Gitmo and do this and none of that has happened and of course people have no recourse To make it happen and of course the question is who do you get to vote for in a democracy?
Well, you get to vote for people who have a lot of money and where do they get that money from?
They get that money from lobbyists and lobbyists give politicians money so that they can take things from the general population.
So the only people that you ever really get to vote for in a democracy is people who've been bought out by interests specifically aligned against yours.
It is a completely suicidal thing to do morally and economically.
It's a complete predatory system and it always ends up with anybody who has any scrap of money in the society being fed into the more of special interest groups, massive debt.
Because, of course, you can't bribe citizens with their own money.
You have to borrow it from the future.
You have to borrow it from foreigners so people get the illusion that they're getting $3 worth of services for every dollar they pay in taxes because the $2 is borrowed or printed through creating inflation and so on.
So, yeah, democracy is just a complete mess because it is an inverted pyramid resting at its tip on the bottom I think we're good to go.
Yeah, democracy is always and forever a complete catastrophe and everybody knows that which is why governments have to take over education as soon as they can and begin promoting democracy through endless propaganda as some sort of panacea and wonderful thing because it is such an obvious disaster that you have to propagandize people into believing otherwise.
So when did you actually stop voting then?
And what do you think about people like Ron Paul?
Because a lot of people in the kind of anti-tyranny movement, you know, have high hopes that Ron Paul can actually change something, which, you know, I don't actually think he can.
I think, you know, the system is too far gone.
I'm curious to know your thoughts.
Yeah, you know, this is like, we're in the last half hour of the movie Titanic, you know?
And when the boat is like three inches above going, that's not when you want to get promoted to captain, right?
The guy who gives you the white hat when the boat is at 45 degrees is not your friend.
To me, the worst conceivable thing for libertarianism would be for Ron Paul to get into power because it would be a complete disaster because the system is too far gone.
But what everybody would remember, of course, is, hey, you know what happened when the last libertarian president got in was there was a huge economic collapse.
They wouldn't know that he'd been handed this dying beast that was impossible to revive.
All that they would remember is libertarianism equals government checks bouncing and riots in the streets and all of this sort of stuff and a depression that lasted for 20 years or whatever is going to happen next.
So no, you need to stay as far away.
Don't touch this government.
I mean it's going to suck you under.
If there's a whirlpool in the middle of a lake, that's not why you go swimming.
You keep as far back as you can from it.
Now, of course, Ron Paul, I think, writes some good books and has some good speeches.
He's particularly astute in terms of the Federal Reserve and fiat currency and all of that sort of stuff.
So his books, I think, can be useful and I imagine that he gets much more exposure to his books because of his candidacy.
So if people look at it as an educational campaign, you know, I guess that's okay.
But I would just like a more consistent thinker.
The idea that There's a man who's a trained doctor who has rejected evolution as a theory or as a reality.
It's embarrassing. Unfortunately, a lot of people view that his sort of religious conservatism, if not fundamentalism, and his rejection of basic scientific truths like evolution, they look at that and say, okay, so that's the quality of his thinking.
He rejects evolution. He believes in fundamentalist Christianity and blah, blah, blah, and he believes in libertarianism.
They put everything in the same bag.
So his irrationality in certain areas then gets transposed to his irrationality.
So everyone says, okay, so libertarianism is like fundamentalist Christianity and a rejection of evolution and that's a big problem.
If you're going to put forward a new idea, you need to be as consistent as humanly possible and you need to overcome as many of your biases as possible so people have fewer excuses.
People will always find some excuses but fewer excuses to reject what it is you're saying.
Okay, so you've never in your life been tempted to try and get into politics?
Sure. When I was younger, I used to practice political speeches all the time.
I was going to start a political party.
I wrote a manifesto and all that kind of stuff.
But, oh yeah, no, it's very tempting.
It's the ring of power, right?
It's like, I can take this ring and I can do good with this ring.
No, no, no, no. Into Mount Doom it goes.
Tolkien was an anarchist and he was talking about politics.
Okay. So Stefan, now I'm just going to throw some things at you, which I'm sure you've heard thousands of times before.
But when you start talking about anarchy, people are going to ask you questions about how would this work?
Absolutely. Would it just be chaos and things like this?
So I'm going to go through some of the things that you talk about in your book, Everyday Anarchy.
And I think one of the main things is national defense.
How, with no government, would a country be able to defend itself against an attacker?
Right. Sorry, I think that's in Practical Anarchy, Everyday Anarchy.
Okay. And these are all free at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
I don't mean to pimp it, but, you know, they are free, but people want to listen to it.
The first thing I would say is that when people come to me, and you and everybody who talks about voluntary solutions, and they say, well, how would this work in a free society?
They're kind of asking the wrong question.
And it's understandable why they ask that question.
But it's sort of like this.
If everybody... It was assigned a spouse by the government.
You know, like there was some laws.
You have to marry. The government would pick your wife or your husband.
You have to go marry them and you could never get divorced.
And then someone came along and said, well, let's get rid of this.
This is horrible.
This is institutionalized rape.
So let's get rid of this. This is bad.
People, of course, would say, well, how the hell would people meet each other?
How on earth would people get married?
Who would organize people getting married?
And the reality is, of course, the answer is, well, nobody.
Nobody would organize people getting married.
People want to get married. I think a lot of people do, at least.
And so, yeah, there may be, you know, friends would set them up.
They'd go to bars. There'd be dating sites on the internet.
But all of these, it's like nobody would organize it.
But people's desires coupled with entrepreneurs' desires for their money would put these two things together.
So who would organize national defense is a question that can't really be answered because it's the wrong kind of question.
It's a question that comes from a status perspective.
In other words, we need some agency who's going to make it happen.
But things happen spontaneously and voluntarily all the time in society.
That's sort of an annoying general answer.
The very specific answer is, first of all, It's really hard to invade a country that has no government.
So the reason you look at Hitler invading France in May of 1940, why did he do it?
Or why did he go and invade Czechoslovakia or Poland?
Well, because he wanted to take over the tax apparatus.
He wanted to take over the tax apparatus.
So he would go and get all the money from the citizens and all of that.
So if a country has no tax apparatus, invading it is really tough.
It's really tough because what are you going to do?
There's no way that everybody's already paying taxes.
There's no deduction at source.
There's no tax collection agency.
There's no IRS. What are you going to do?
It's sort of like if you want to get yourself some free food, you're going to go and take over some farm where the animals are all domesticated already.
You're going to just go and invade that farm in some sort of animal farm kind of way.
What you're not going to do is go into some wilds where there is no farm.
Because that's not going to do you any good.
So it's really hard to invade a state of society.
Secondly, countries that have nuclear weapons don't get invaded.
They don't, right?
I mean, this is why there's been no European war since the invention of nuclear weapons, because the mutually assured destruction thing.
So if you want to prevent people from invading you, all you need to do is...
Get some nukes. And if we say in America, let's say, or wherever, they would cost you $300 million a year to have a couple of nukes run by some company, then it's a buck a year for your national defense as opposed to what Americans are paying right now, which is just lunatic and, of course, British people are paying quite a lot as well.
So it's really cheap. If all you want is to actually defend your country, it's really cheap.
You just need a couple of nukes and so on.
And people say, well, then the people who've got nukes will come and they'll point their nukes at you and they'll create a new government and blah, blah, blah.
Well, of course, everybody's concerned about that.
So the entrepreneur who is best able to reassure the population that they're not going to do that is the one who's going to get everybody's business.
So you say, well, we need a private police force.
Well, the private police force will then just turn around and set up a new government.
But everyone's afraid of that, of course.
So you have to ask people.
I try and turn the question around.
So I say, okay. So people say, well, you want private police.
Well, why wouldn't the police just take over everybody and set up a new government?
It's like, okay, you sell me.
How that wouldn't happen, right?
So you be the police force who's trying to sell me their services in a free society and I say to you, well, what's going to stop you from just taking over the whole neighborhood and setting up a new government?
And then you have to answer that question.
There's lots of ways people can answer it.
You know, you can say, okay.
Well, I'm going to put $50 million in a bank account and anybody who finds that I'm plotting to take over a neighborhood will get that money.
So you just set up a reward system or you set up some sort of independent auditing system to make sure you're not accumulating more weapons than you need or anything like that.
Or if you arrest someone unjustly, you will pay them $100,000.
There's lots of different ways that you can set things up to reassure people and I'm not going to pretend that I can, in my head, reproduce the entire entrepreneurial intelligence of the entire world in terms of solving these problems.
But people's fears will be dealt with by entrepreneurs in very creative ways and that's, I think, the best we can conceivably hope for in terms of reassuring us that whoever we nominate to protect us isn't going to end up enslaving us.
Okay. Now, do your ideas about, like, having nuclear weapons, does that bring you into conflict with other schools of anarchy?
Because, you know, there are anarchists who are totally opposed to nuclear power, for example, and nuclear weapons.
Well, look, I mean, I've, yeah, I mean, look, there's anarchism has, there's left and right anarchism.
So left anarchism is no state, but no property, right?
So they want to live in communes and so on.
And I guess more on the right anarchism is anarcho-capitalism, where you're allowed for private property.
And, of course, I don't quibble with what people want to do because I just go right back to the non-initiation of force, the non-aggression principle.
That's my guiding light.
That is my north star, right?
So if people say, well, I don't want nuclear weapons, then it's like, okay, then don't have them.
You cannot have them but if somebody wants to build nuclear weapons to protect himself from some sort of threat of invasion and there are lots of other people who peacefully and voluntarily want to give that group money to fund that, then building and having a nuclear weapon is not the initiation of force.
I know it's scary but it's still not the initiation of force.
If people say, well, I don't want it, then my answer is, okay, well, make your case to people.
If you can come up with a cheaper and better way – look, people don't want nuclear weapons.
Nobody wants weapons.
Weapons are an overhead. Weapons are like an alarm system in your car.
You only have it because people might steal it.
It's a stupid overhead to have.
If someone can come up with a way to protect your property without requiring nuclear weapons, then they will be able to sell weapons.
That service much more cheaply than people who have to build and maintain nuclear weapons.
So if there's a cheaper way to do it, if there's a more efficient way to do it, fantastic!
Fantastic! Furthermore, if you don't have weapons in a stateless society, or at least you don't have government weapons or some sort of big national defense weapons, then it's also less valuable to invade you.
The reason Hitler went into Czechoslovakia was for the Skoda armaments factories, which were one of the biggest producers of armaments in Europe at the time.
If you can find a way to defend some country without having weapons, then it's cheaper and it's more effective.
I'm not going to say it's impossible.
I'm sure lots of great things could be done.
I mean, there's so many things that you could think of that may or may not be possible.
But if people don't want nukes, great.
Then set up a company that can find a way to protect people without nukes and you'll own the market.
Okay. And in terms of self-defense, you're very much in favor of people having the right to bear arms, I believe.
Sure, yeah. Look, having a gun is not the initiation of force.
Again, it just comes right back to that issue.
Having a gun is not the initiation of force.
I will say this, though, that the current state of humanity...
It's pretty hysterical and pretty frightened and pretty aggressive.
And we are that way for a number of reasons.
I don't think it's human nature at all.
Human nature is, you know, 90% of people's personalities are derived from their experiences in their society and in their families.
So right now, people are kind of jumpy and people are kind of skittish and people are kind of aggressive, right?
Just, you know, look at comments on the internet for anything that's anywhere posted, right?
You suck! You're terrible!
I can't believe you! And you'll see them when we post this for sure, right?
I have no problem with people owning weapons.
Of course, it's not the initiation of force to own a weapon, but I will say this.
We will not achieve a free society until people calm the hell down a little bit, until people are a little bit less aggressive.
I think that's a multi-generational change.
We need more peaceful parenting.
We need less confining and indoctrinating schools.
We need a whole bunch of things to occur.
By the time we have a free society, there will be almost no criminals.
Criminals are produced through child abuse and through the governmental abuses like the war on drugs and welfare programs.
All of these things breed criminals.
By the time we have a stateless society, by the time we actually have a free, peaceful society, there will be so few criminals around.
It'd be less than 1% of what we have now.
The only people who will be criminals will be people who have a brain tumor that harms their personality or people who get struck by lightning and their brains get fried or they have some mental illness that we don't know about.
They may then become violent, but that's more like an epileptic attack than some sort of conscious evil thing.
By the time we have a free society, I don't think there's going to be much point having a gun.
Having a gun in the future would be like having a cannon now.
I mean, I guess you could if you're a collector, but what's the point?
Because we're not being invaded by pirate ships anymore.
Okay, that's interesting.
So you pretty much agree with the Zeitgeist Movement and the Venus Project in terms of why criminals are made.
Because I know you had a to-and-fro with Peter Joseph recently.
Well, with one of his representatives, and I certainly don't mean to lay claim to any sort of precedent, but I've been talking about this stuff for at least five or six years, so I'd like to think that they agree with me, but maybe I agree with them too.
But look, for people who are more curious about this, I have a whole series with interviews, which people can find.
It's all free. It's a series called The Bomb and the Brain which goes into the science and medicine behind the formation of the criminal personality and what factors go into to drive it.
Criminality is one of the easiest problems in the world to solve in terms of The practicalities, you just have to not aggress against children and you end up with non-violent children.
If a child is not aggressed against, the odds of that child growing up to be a criminal is about the same as if the child is never exposed to Mandarin, the child growing up speaking fluent Mandarin.
It's just not going to happen. Violence is a language that we teach our children through aggression and then it bounces back and it physically changes the brain.
You end up with a larger amygdala, a larger fight or flight response, a smaller neofrontal cortex, which is your inhibition, It has you defer gratification and resist the impulse to violence.
So you physically change the brain of children by aggressing or abusing them and we're not going to have a free society until children grow up without those pressures and without that resulting brain trauma that is really criminality.
I'm not saying people don't have any responsibility.
Of course, there's still a choice, but we have to stop stacking the odds so much against kids in society and that's how we get a freer world.
I don't think there's any other way. And how long do you think that could take?
I mean, you said, you know, generations.
Could we be talking hundreds of years?
Or, I mean, how long? Well, I think, you know, the great tragedy is there's very strong arguments to say that child rearing is going the wrong way at the moment.
And the reason for that, of course, is there's this terrible, terrible tragedy about the family.
The family has just been eviscerated over the last few generations because, you know, governments have We've funded some pretty radical feminist groups.
The radical feminist groups have convinced women that working is good and staying home with kids is not as good.
A bunch of huge amounts of women have gone out into the workforce for two reasons.
One, of course, there's an ideological drive to do it.
The second is, of course, as women have gone into the workforce, what's happened?
Well, taxes have gone up. Where one worker, usually a man, could sustain a three- So, government-funded groups which convince women to go into the marketplace, that way they could be taxed.
Right? All that's happened is now women have been sucked into the marketplace because the taxation is so high and so a lot of kids are going into daycare.
Daycare is not great for kids, not great for kids, particularly younger kids.
Younger kids who are in daycare for more than 20 hours a week experience exactly the same symptoms as those who are completely abandoned by their maternal abandonment.
They experience maternal abandonment which is catastrophic for bonding, for maturity, for empathy, for all of these kinds of good things.
Parenting is kind of going, I think, in the wrong way in that we're kind of farming our kids out like 18th century French aristocrats to these collective agencies to raise them.
I'm a stay-at-home dad with my daughter, so I know the difference.
I also worked in a daycare and I've seen the difference.
A daycare is just lord of the flies.
All you're doing is managing stuff.
You can't really have any personal relationships with the kids.
Parenting is going in the wrong way.
If we can make parenting, if we can turn it around and if people can really commit to staying home with their kids for the first couple of years, then we can make a huge difference.
But social change, to expect it in less than 60 to 80 years, things like ending slavery or the gaining of the rights of economic equality and political equality for women or for blacks or other minorities, they all took between 100 to 150 years.
I think we can move it faster now, but it is multi-generational because Well, for the reasons I sort of stated earlier.
So I think we need to be patient.
Politics is this short-term solution that leads nowhere.
I think we really need to start with personal relationships more so than with political ones.
Okay. Now, we'll have to just get some more specific answers off you, because if you mention anarchy, people do ask about the education of the poor and how are the old and the sick going to be taken care of.
Maybe you can just answer those points.
Right. Okay. Well, so let's just talk about education.
So when people say, well, how will the poor be educated in a free society?
What they're assuming is that the poor are being educated now.
The poor are absolutely not being educated in a government system.
The poor are being propagandized.
The poor are being caged.
The poor are being locked up, so to speak.
The kids, particularly in American inner-city schools, they're prisons.
They're actually designed by people who build prisons.
They've got metal detectors. Significant proportions of American kids go to school armed.
It's monstrous. The teaching that goes on there is ridiculous.
The educational standards are collapsing year by year.
And if you compare that to what was going on before government schools came into America in the mid-19th century, you had a literacy rate in pre-government school America of over 93% or 94%.
This is significant literacy.
This is like reading Thomas Paine.
This is reading Alex de Tocqueville.
This is reading Moby Dick kind of literacy, not I can read half a cereal box while sitting on the crapper literacy, which is what we're talking about now.
The poor were being very well educated, very well educated prior to the institution of government schools.
Since the institution of government schools, and you can see this is a line going straight down on the graph, literacy rates have declined consistently to the point now where Significant portions of the United States population.
I'm not sure what it is in England, but they are functionally illiterate.
Functionally illiterate. Can't complete a job application.
10, 20, 25% of people can't complete a job application.
Can't read simple instructions for medicine.
I mean, they're illiterate.
So it's not like, well, how will the poor be educated?
How will we maintain the standards of education that government schools have?
Lord, I hope we don't.
I hope that we vastly surpass them.
But look, people want their kids to be educated.
Most parents want their kids to be educated and have a great life and so on.
People will provide that and there's lots of innovative solutions for that.
In England, there was a Lancaster system of education in the 19th century that in constant dollars, so in today's dollars for two semesters of education, which was the school year, cost the equivalent of $40 to $50.
The way they did that was that the teacher would teach the elder kids and then the elder kids would offer They're tutoring services to the younger kids who would then offer them to the younger kids.
It was a cascade. Everybody became a teacher except for the very new kids.
It was very, very cheap and it was very, very effective.
Literacy rates that came out of that were fantastic.
This is just one example.
Right now in the US, it's $12,000 to $16,000 to cage these kids in these violent quasi prisons and teach them nothing and propagandize everything, whereas for $40,000 or $50,000, you could get a great education where you not only You learn, but you learn how to teach, which is also one of the best ways of figuring out whether somebody knows it, right?
If you really want to know something, figure out whether you can teach it or not.
So this is just some examples throughout history, but yeah, I mean, we need to get the boot of the state off the brains of the kids to release them to learn things as well.
I mean, there's no need for these compulsory education things for 14 or 15 years.
I mean, it's crazy. Okay.
And what about healthcare? That's another big issue that, you know, people have problems with when you talk about anarchy.
How would people get healthcare if they were, you know, very ill and they didn't have much money?
What would happen to them? Yeah, well, how are they getting healthcare now?
Right? I mean, you're in England, right?
Well, I'm from England, but I actually live in the Netherlands, yeah.
Oh, okay. Well, I don't know what it's like in the Netherlands, but, I mean, here in Canada, I mean, it's ridiculous.
I mean, a quarter of Canadians can't get a doctor.
Can't get a doctor. Can you imagine?
And, I mean, waiting lists are crazy.
You know, I once had to have – it was a pretty harmless little cyst I had under the skin.
I had to wait two years to get this thing removed.
Two years. People who need cataract surgery are waiting six months, 12 months, 18 months.
So, how are people getting it now?
It's crazy. In England, the National Healthcare Service is – oh, it's appalling.
Here in Canada, some guy had liver cancer and the government just said, "Well, you know, we think you're going to die, so we're not going to fund you." They get to take it away at a whim.
So he paid his own way over to England and actually got his liver cancer cured and now has come back and trying to sue the government for his money.
Good luck with that. So my question, and what is happening to the cost of healthcare?
Cost of healthcare, like everything which is socialized, like everything which is taken over by the government and subject to special interest groups and paid for by the generic and often future taxpayer, it's getting more expensive and more expensive and more expensive and more expensive.
You know, you used to be able to have an in-hospital birth in the 60s.
This is constant dollars in the US. You'd have an in-hospital birth with a full-on doctor, you know, up to a week in hospital.
It would cost you about $900 to $1,000.
Now, how much does it cost?
Tens of thousands of dollars because the prices just keep going up and people say, well, it's because of technology.
No, no, no. Technology makes things cheaper.
Technology makes things cheaper.
If you look at your computer, I mean, what can you buy now compared to five years ago for the same money?
So, you know, and it's not sustainable, right?
So the poor, what's going to happen to the poor when we run out of money?
When England runs out of money, when I'm sure the Netherlands runs out of EU because they're all getting drained to Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain, what is going to happen in Canada when we can't pay our bills anymore because the deficits are becoming catastrophic?
So my concern is, yeah, you give a bunch of, quote, free money to the poor right now.
It looks like you've solved the problem but you've set up a system that has an internal distorting and destructive logic so that you're going to end up running out of money to help the poor with And then, you know, anarchists or libertarians, people often say, well, you know, you just want everyone to stand on their own two feet.
No, we love charity.
Charity is great. In America, there used to be these things called friendly societies.
They used to exist in England as well, where people who were poor could get very high quality health care for the modern equivalent of about $50 to $100 per year in terms of insurance, because everybody would pool their resources and they would encourage healthy living and so on.
And these things all vanished when the government came along.
And they will come back if the government goes away and they will be much more productive and sustainable.
Okay. Now, a lot of anarchists are against capitalism, against money.
And I'm personally not against money because, you know, it's just a medium of exchange.
But how would that work under an anarchist system?
Who would produce the money?
And how would we ensure that basically the system that we have now didn't develop?
Yeah, no, look, that's an excellent point.
And I really do appreciate people who bring that stuff up.
Because, I mean, the system we have now...
It sucks in such a terrible way to get overly technical, but the system is very, very destructive.
I agree that the system we have now, if you call the system we have now capitalism, then yeah, I'm a fervent anti-capitalist.
I don't think there's anything wrong with property rights.
If people want to voluntarily create money to exchange goods, fantastic.
I think that's great. Money is just another good or service.
Money is like a couch or a car.
It's just some way of making things more efficient.
If you want to try and sit without a couch, your knees are going to get kind of tired.
If you want to kind of operate without money, it just means you have to do a lot of barter.
If you want eggs and somebody else wants butter, then you have to try and find some way to get people together.
Money is the easiest way to do that and it solves a lot of problems.
But money can be produced in a free society.
Money historically has been produced in a free society.
In 19th century America, banks issued promissory notes and they were exchangeable for gold and they exchanged with each other and there were a number of different currencies and you were able to exchange them and so on.
There were people who did that for a living.
I don't see how there's any particular problem having currency in a free society.
To create a currency, it does not violate the initiation of the use of force.
To prevent somebody else from creating a currency because you want to have a monopoly, well, by golly, that is a violation of the initiation of force, of the non-aggression principle and that's what governments do.
They create this monopoly where they can type whatever the hell they want into their own bank account with everybody else picking up the table.
Who wouldn't want that power? And they ban anybody else from trying to create.
Some guy in the US created something called the Liberty Dollar and he was trying to substitute it for the US currency.
I think he got 10 years in jail and they confiscated everything.
So money, you know, look at Bitcoin, right?
It's a private peer-to-peer currency that's been developed and people can come up with whatever they want.
They just can't point guns in people's faces to get stuff done.
That's really all it comes down to.
Okay. What's your take on gold and silver?
There's a big debate going on at the moment on YouTube about gold and silver and whether it's worth buying that.
Some people think that's a good thing to do and other people think that's not going to save us in any way.
What's your take on precious powers?
I'm no investment advisor so everybody can do whatever they want but I think that they are very good.
There's something interesting about gold.
I don't think gold will be the fundamental unit of value in a free society because it's still subject to a lot of instability.
If you look at Spain in the 16th, 17th century, Spain went to the New World and got all of the gold from the Incas and the Aztecs.
The gold all then flowed into Spain and destroyed its economy for like 400 years.
If somebody finds a way to produce gold or somebody finds some big store of gold, it could really destabilize things because then gold, of course, would lose value because there'd be more of it.
There'd be inflation in gold.
I think in the future, things are going to be much more finely calibrated than just dependent upon some metal that people can pull out of the ground.
I will say this, that an ounce of gold about 150 years ago You bought a nice suit.
An ounce of gold today will buy you a nice suit.
Gold tends to hold its value relative to real stuff, not to just fiat currency or whatever, but relative to real stuff.
If you want to hedge against inflation, in other words, the overprinting of money in order to pay off debt or to bribe voters or other special interest groups, I think gold is a pretty good place to be.
Okay, excellent. Now, a very interesting part I found of Everyday Anarchy was where you talk about academics' relationship with anarchy and how it's not discussed in academia, because I think we see this kind of self-censorship reflected in the media, you know, especially with this recent Bin Laden thing where none of the mainstream media discussed Alternative theories about the supposed killing of Bin Laden.
And it's almost like a self-censorship.
And a phrase that you use is he who pays the piper calls the tune.
And maybe you can go into that because I thought it was very interesting about academia and anarchy.
Yeah, look, it's a fantastic proof of anarchy.
If you ever want to know whether anarchy can work, just ask yourself why no major U.S. media has published any pictures of the victims of the Middle Eastern wars in the paper.
You'll get pictures of soldiers, American soldiers, you know, in uniform saluting in front of a flag if they die, the mournful taps and this and that.
But you simply won't see in the New York Times, in USA Today, the Washington Post, any of these places, you simply will not see any dead Iraqis or any dead Afghanis.
There's no law about that, of course.
The government hasn't passed any laws.
It's illegal to do it. You simply can't see it because people follow social rules.
Society runs on social rules.
It's only at the fringes that it runs on law.
These social rules are very effective and very powerful.
Why don't professors talk about anarchy?
Because the professors are protected by the state.
The state gives a lot of money to professors and it protects them very well.
It cocoons them in its ample and evil bosom.
Professors get tenure.
They can't be fired. Professors originally said, well, I don't want to get fired from my radical views, so I need tenure.
Of course, what happens is inevitable, which is that because of tenure, nobody with any radical views ever gets hired now because you can't fire them.
So they have to work three or four or five hours a week.
They get sabbaticals paid for.
They get to take a year off every couple of years and just stick around to the library or the lab or do whatever they want.
They have these absolutely pampered sweet lives.
Like any court toadies, they live a pretty pampered existence.
And the reason for that is the government does not want the intellectuals criticizing the state.
And so the government traditionally and historically has extended lots of privileges To the intellectuals so that there becomes a natural alignment.
It's like looking at salmon in a strong current.
They all end up swimming the same way.
The strong current is government money and government privileges.
You really, really, really want to make sure that you keep the intellectuals pampered and cozy and that that money comes from the state.
The reason for that is that people will instinctively avoid accusations of hypocrisy.
Which is why Governor Schwarzenegger did not talk about banging his maid and making a kid that grew up in his household that he never admitted was his at the same time that he was attempting to say that gays shouldn't get married because he's all for the institution and sanctity of marriage.
He has to avoid that.
He has to avoid talking about his bastard or bastardess or whatever it is because he instinctively is going to avoid accusations of hypocrisy.
And so if an academic who is pampered and controlled and fed and protected by the state starts talking about the immorality of the state, first thing his students are going to say is, well, dude, if you think the state is the mafia, then shouldn't you maybe move out of Don Corleone's basement and get your own place?
It's what people are going to say, so they avoid it.
And that's the whole point. Yeah, absolutely.
So we've got this ideal, which is anarchy.
And it seems, as you mentioned in your book, such a massive undertaking to actually even move towards realizing this ideal.
What can people do apart from just discussing things like we are now?
That's a great question.
and what I would suggest they don't do is political action because that's to say that you can use violence for good and they just don't think you can so I would stay away from that I'd also stay away from academia because it's just such a hypocritical place to be if you're into voluntarism but so yeah things you can do um Raise your children without aggression.
I have never, of course, hit my daughter.
I've never raised my voice at her.
I've never called her a name.
I have never, ever aggressed against her.
She is a complete delight.
She is developing incredibly fast.
She's just an enormous joy and pleasure to be with.
She's really good at listening, even though she's like two and a half, which is not usually a good age for listening.
She is a really, really good listener.
You know, sit down and explain to her why things have to be limited or why certain things can't happen.
She's great with it. And so just raise your children peacefully.
If you raise your children without violence, they simply won't speak the language of the state when they grow up, and that will inevitably change.
So that's the first thing. The second thing that I would say is that human beings as a whole, except for a small minority, do not like violence.
They do not want violence.
They do not like it.
And the only reason that they support the state is, A, they think it's necessary or that if the state goes away, there'll be more violence, which is not true at all.
And secondly, because the violence is abstracted, right?
You get a check from the government, you're like, woohoo, free money, even though you know it's partly your taxes or whatever.
That's a whole lot different from going to your neighbor with a gun and saying, give me $500.
They don't want to go to their neighbor and say, give me $500, but if they get a $500 check that the government has taken from their neighbor and delivered to them, they're like, hey, I can cash this.
This is a civilized interaction.
It's just a piece of paper. I go sign it and blah, blah, blah.
The way to expose the reality of the state is to point out what I call the gun in the room.
Anytime anybody wants the government to do something They're putting a gun in the room.
They're putting a gun into the equation.
So people say, and there are some ridiculous anarchists in England who protesting about government cuts to education.
I'm an anarchist who's protesting a smaller amount of government spending.
That doesn't make any sense, right?
But when somebody says a higher education should be free, Well, that sounds great.
Who wouldn't want education for free?
Yay! But it doesn't make any sense.
The reality is that people are going to get their money taken from them by force in order to pay for this and it's either going to be directly through taxation or more likely it's going to be indirectly through national debts.
In other words, people who aren't even born yet are going to have their livelihoods stolen from them at the point of a gun because they'll have to pay not only the bill for free education but the interest that accumulates until they reach tax paying age.
And so you're saying you have to strip it down to its essentials, to the reality of what is actually occurring and say, look, what you're suggesting is that we should put guns in people's faces and make them pay for other people's education.
And when you put it that way, most people will say, well, okay, that's not so good, right?
That's not the way we want things to go.
And so you need to absolutely...
You need to get the reality.
You need to get to the core of what people are actually saying.
Nobody can argue against free education.
It's like arguing against free healthcare.
Who wouldn't want free healthcare? It's a great thing.
But that's not the reality of what's being proposed.
What's being proposed is the initiation of the use of force.
The initiation of the use of violence or fraud or theft in the case of intergenerational indebtedness through the state.
And once you start pointing out the reality of what people are proposing and you take it out of the propagandistic language of everything is free, then people are like, oh, okay, well, I guess I don't want people to have guns pushed in their faces, have their money taken to pay for education.
There's probably going to be a better way, but I don't like the violence.
So you have to keep pointing out the violence and get out of the language of propaganda and to the language of the reality of what people are proposing.
Okay, excellent, Stefan.
We're coming to the end of the show now.
So I'd like to thank you very much for joining me on the Mr.
Britt Show. It's been a great chat.
And before you go, I'd like you to tell people where they can find you and where they can download your excellent e-books, which are free.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I really appreciate it.
I'm sorry it wasn't more of a conversation, but I know you wanted the roadmap and all, so I'm sorry we didn't get more of a back and forth, perhaps next time.
But yeah, if people want to go, Free Domain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world.
I dare say throughout history, but mostly because of the technology.
We've had, I think, close to 30 million downloads now, 5 or 6 million downloads.
Thank you very much.
And I'm on Adam vs.
The Man, which is a television show every week and other forms of media.
So I really do appreciate people who come by.
You can take everything as free.
If you like it, the show does support itself.
Or I eat through voluntary donations.
So if people wanted to help out that way, that's much appreciated.
Excellent. Great stuff, Stefan.
And I'll also upload this interview to YouTube.
So I'll pass that on to you.
So thanks very much. I appreciate it.
It was really enjoyable. Thank you. Great talk.
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